Evening Nigh Reflections Lensography

It rained last night, but I could swear what I found on the grass this morning was dew. it smelled like another morning long ago, when I went to Sunday School next door to my Great Aunt Ersie's house. I crept along Kentucky blue-grass wearing layers of Sunday best, topped off with my cousin's burgundy dress, the nicest of the hand-me-downs. I can't remember if my legs were in wrinkled winter white tights or if they were free for the season, pale pink and breeze-stirred. I don't remember what type of birds called that morning, or in what configuration the clouds lay. What remains is the general impression: the smell of morning, the sound and temperature, the feel of morning crunching beneath patent leather shoes, morning pounding in my chest.

That morning was almost stolen away from me. My brother and I were to go by ourselves to our Sunday school classes, then meet our elders for church at the door of the chapel. My brother was seven. I was five: an eager to please child, a run-home-and-get-your-old-sneakers-for-Mrs.Kranz's-grandson-who-fell-in-the-pond child, a sit-here-and-read-until-it's-time-to-go-home child, a tell-me-if-the-other-children misbehave child. But all that apparent virtue was for nought. When I headed toward the chapel door after Sunday School, I was stopped by a church lady who said, "Little girl, you can't go in there. You are too young."

Despite my protests -- "My mother said to meet her in church" -- and despite my agitation -- "My mother will worry. She will be angry with me," -- the church lady led me down to a place the sun didn't shine: the church nursery in the basement. She left me there amongst babies in play pens and bitty little children who did not understand. I was told I could play with any of the toys, but I had disobeyed my mother, and moreover, I was supposed to be in church. Play did not seem fitting.

That morning was taken away from me almost, but not quite. Not quite because finally services were over and the church lady led me back out by the hand to find my mother, who listened to her explanation -- "The little girl can't go in the church because she's not six yet," -- in a way that was neither worried nor angry. Not quite, because I again felt breeze on my legs and morning crunching beneath my patent leather shoes. Fear fell away fast that morning -- and perhaps my memory of the "falling away" is so vivid because it wouldn't happen that way forever or for long.

"What a serious child," I think, remembering. "There never was any hope for her, was there -- a child like that? She was bound to burn out quickly." And yet...

I am happy this morning in what may be a fleeting way, like coming back up a narrow staircase into daylight. I smell the damp grass, and, wonder of wonders, it is the same. It is the same grass smell and the same temperature as that other morning, the exact demarcation between cool and warm, when how your skin reacts depends on winter and all that has come before. I have a blood memory of that temperature: cool turning to warm, night turning to morning, spring churning on in to summer.

Memory opens, and I remember one last detail of a long ago morning. I see myself getting dressed for Sunday School, skidding across hardwood floors, prancing, dancing, feeling like a fairy princess because I have on my cousin's old nylon romba underpants, with the three rows of ruffles across the seat. My perspective shifts. My child self twirls. Not such a serious thing after all, was she? Now I am laughing because she lives on in memory, that five-year-old self. She pirouettes. She bows low. And -- with rows of ruffles all across her behind -- she greets the new day.

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